Technological Advances in CV Care Depend on Human Resources: Antoine Keller, MD

Technological advancements are rapidly transforming the ways cardiovascular care can be delivered. Among those most impactful for Antoine Keller, MD, FACC, FACS, cardiothoracic surgeon at Ochsner Lafayette General Hospital and founder of HeartSense, are the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital auscultation. As Keller previously discussed with The American Journal of Managed Care^®, HeartSense leverages these tools to bring more accessible cardiovascular assessments and screening to Louisiana’s rural communities.

A patient’s geography can create real barriers to quality cardiovascular care. As digital solutions continue transforming clinical abilities to prevent and manage cardiovascular conditions, Keller continued by speaking to the foreseeable impact these technologies could have on health equity and the added value of a strong health care work force.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

How do you see AI and digital health tools evolving in the future to further improve cardiovascular care for underserved populations?

The delivery of health care and the utilization of artificial intelligence tools is kind of a 2-sided coin, because we have access to such phenomenal technology that has the ability to be able to show us where the gaps are in care and give us action plans to be able to ameliorate these gaps. But by the same token, we have so much information that it is very difficult sometimes to be able to focus on the things that are the most important.

A really good example is data mining of the EMR. You can find so many patterns of disease if you use the incredible resource of the EMR—electronic medical record—that we have today. But there's so many things that need to be treated or developed that we don't have enough time to be able to do them. The integration of data science and the health record is something that is really interesting and intriguing to me, because depending upon how many people you have that have the time and energy to be able to devote to uncovering all of these things, you can keep somebody busy for a long time. And we don't have enough people who have an interest in data science to be able to help us to develop these kinds of treatment paradigms as clinicians, but it's going to be eminently important.

People often ask me, if I had 3 wishes as a clinician who deals with data science and artificial intelligence, what would they be? You cannot discount the fact that human resources and having smart people think about how to best treat these particular problems. You can't underestimate the importance of having those human resources and people who have a curiosity and an interest, so human resources, human resources, and human resources would be my top 3, despite the fact that the technology is certainly something that we are leaning upon more and more every day.